Don't You Trust Me?

by Patrice Kindl

  Anyway, as I was saying, the money was mounting up, though I couldn’t help but think with mingled frustration and resentment of the much larger sums I had been forced to hand over. After all, I’d done the work. Why should the charities reap such rewards? At least the net results were positive, and I was learning new skills all the time.

  For instance, I was becoming more social. Back in my old school I’d been nobody. The power structure had firmed up in middle school, with me on the outside looking in. Now, coming here as an unknown entity from exotic Southern California, I had made a big splash in the small pool of Lebanon Hill High. I was reading people’s faces and actions better these days, since there were so many who were not only willing but eager to talk to me. I was steadily hauling Brett into my orbit and out of Helena’s, much to her chagrin. And I had discovered that whenever you are at a loss for what to do or say, if you put a pleasant, amused expression on your face and wait, like when Grandma wanted to know about my mother’s shop, somebody will fill in the silence and fix the problem.

  If I’d known what a great hustle this philanthropy stuff was, I’d have taken it up long ago. Then my parents might have been fooled into thinking I was a person of sterling character, and I wouldn’t have had to leave home.

  But if I hadn’t left home, I might never have learned to ride, which I was enjoying more and more as Bounce allowed me to gallop all over her property, and I would almost certainly never have eaten Mrs. Barnes’s pecan pie, one of the highlights of my life so far.

  I had no complaints.

  12

  “AND NOW WE COME TO the character of Morgan le Fay. An enchantress and a sorceress, she came of fairy blood, hence her name, ‘le Fay,’ which means ‘of the fairies.’ Morgan? Perhaps you can give us some insight into the character of your namesake?”

  Ms. Tavernier, my English teacher, was trolling for comments during the last class of the day, at the peak of a long, golden October afternoon. The whole class was staring out the windows at blue skies and red and yellow foliage, bending their united will onto the clock on the wall to make it tick faster toward dismissal time.

  I had finished reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” the night before. It’s this long medieval poem with somebody in it named Morgan le Fay. My interest was aroused by the name, so I did some research on her. Hers was an arresting and provocative personality, like mine.

  “Fairies, or the fay, aren’t those stupid little twits with wings in children’s books,” I responded. “They’re like normal people, only much, much better. They’re better-looking, smarter, and immortal. They can cast a spell of glamour so you don’t see them as they actually are, and they can manipulate language so you’ll believe anything they say. They’re pretty amazing, and Morgan le Fay was their queen. She’s the one who made the Green Knight and Sir Gawain do all that stuff in the poem. She was the one with the power.”

  Ms. Tavernier’s eyebrows rose. I think maybe she had been almost as desperate to escape the classroom as the rest of us—her eyes had been flicking toward her watch—and hadn’t expected much by way of a reply other than a shrug.

  “Well, that was a spirited defense, Morgan! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you so animated before. You know, the fay are thought of as easily offended, malicious, and even cruel when annoyed.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “I mean, if you were dealing with inferiors, wouldn’t you be kind of cranky if they weren’t properly respectful?”

  “Ummm . . .” A sharp crease formed between Ms. Tavernier’s eyes. “I don’t know about that—”

  “Sure you would,” I argued, because of course anybody would; she just didn’t want to admit it. “And look, I know that the fay weren’t great to mortals, but that’s because they thought of humans the way that humans think of a domestic animal, that’s all. You wouldn’t get upset if the owner of a dog or a horse bred them and sold their offspring, would you? You wouldn’t see anything wrong with training an animal to do a job for you.”

  Ms. Tavernier looked dazed. She opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment the bell rang and everybody surged to their feet. They rushed past me, a few of them casting dubious glances in my direction. I ignored them.

  There were so many similarities between the cold and the fay! So yeah, okay, most of the cold I’d met in my life were pretty unimpressive, unlike the fairies of legend, but it only stood to reason that there would be dumb ones and smart ones, and that the smart ones (like me!) managed to hide themselves so you couldn’t spot them.

  I was enchanted with the fay.

  I had set up in-store donation boxes (constructed by my little team of do-gooders, from cardboard and clear plastic) all over town, and the emptying of these had largely replaced the weekly door-to-door fund-raising. These were tempting for me, as most of the contributions were in cash. I had to force myself to turn over the majority of the funds, or else people would get suspicious. Because you could see there was money in them. Another defect was that, as the boxes lacked my persuasive, in-person skills, they were not nearly so productive. Although I had no desire to go back to the hard slog of door-to-door, I was getting restless. I needed a better source of income.

  And what do you know? Voila! A better source of income appeared.

  The whole racehorse thing was Bounce’s idea, not mine. Brooke was blathering on about our charitable activities while we were saddling up one Saturday.

  “So you don’t stick to one charity?” Bounce asked.

  “No, Morgan says that there are so many deserving causes—it wouldn’t be fair,” Brooke said.

  Yes, Morgan had said that, but actually, mixing it up meant that none of the charities would begin to feel proprietary about us, and hence likely to investigate too closely.

  “I wonder, then . . . ,” said Bounce.

  Apparently Bounce’s sister ran a horse rescue operation on a farm ten miles away, called Pegasus Stables. She took in retired thoroughbreds from the racetracks and tried to retrain and place them with new owners. If she couldn’t, she kept them herself. Most racehorses retire before they’re six, Bounce said, and then can go on to live another twenty or more years.

  See, once horses stopped being used for transportation in the twentieth century, we didn’t need them anymore. So, unless racehorses were big winners at the track, they were sold for slaughter and turned into pet food as soon as their competition days were over. Seemed perfectly sensible to me. Who needs some old slowpoke horse loafing around the place and eating its head off when there are races to be won? However, neither Brooke nor Bounce agreed with my (unspoken) opinion.

  “Oh, how horrible!”

  “Yes, after nearly killing themselves trying to please their owners, they were sold off for a few hundred dollars to be butchered. Perfectly healthy, young horses, some with scores of wins to their names. There’s a new law against it in this country, but they still get sold to Canadian and Mexican dealers, who truck them back to their home countries and kill them there.”

  Brooke moaned in distress at this hard-hearted behavior.

  “My sister’s farm is an accredited not-for-profit organization,” Bounce went on, “and I’ve always wanted to raise some money for her. You wouldn’t believe how much one visit from the veterinarian can cost. Maybe we could use my stables . . . sell pony rides, or something? My expenses are high too, so I can’t offer too much, but maybe you girls can think of a way.”

  “Ask Morgan,” said Brooke, with touching faith. “She’ll know what to do.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  AFTER THE RACE IS RUN . . .

  SADDLE UP AND ENJOY A DAY

  AT TWO AREA HORSE FARMS!

  FUNDS RAISED WILL BENEFIT

  RETIRED RACEHORSES

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23RD

  Rain Date, October 30TH

  After the race is run, after the cheering dies down and the crowd goes home, after a racehorse’s running career is over—[blah, blah. Lots of stuff here abou
t poor old racehorses].

  The junior class of Lebanon Hill High School is proud to sponsor this event to raise money to benefit Pegasus Stables in their work to help provide new lives for animals formerly in the racing industry.

  We had to really scramble to get ready in time, but we had sponsors and volunteers standing in line for the chance to participate. You’d think everybody had been waiting all their lives to aid retired racehorses or something. I mean, what about the poor little doggies and kitty cats being done out of a square meal? Didn’t anybody care about them not getting any horse meat to eat? It made no sense to me. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy riding, but once an animal outlives its usefulness, I’m not sentimental. I did get some idea of why this event was so popular, from Brooke’s father, who thought it was a nice, “cultural” cause for his daughter to be involved in. Meaning, I guess, that it smelled of old, established money, and that definitely appealed to a car salesman. I had no difficulty signing Uncle Karl up as a major sponsor.

  Albany is kind of worthy but dull. Pretty much its major purpose is as a place for legislators to gather and state workers to put in their forty hours a week until retirement age. But thirty-five miles north is the summer resort of Saratoga Springs, where the rich people go to gamble. Identifying with that sophisticated, glitzy world was a winning strategy.

  And of course there were lots of juniors and seniors at school who needed to put in their volunteer hours and hadn’t gotten around to it yet. As the committee chair, I used my power to give my own classmates preference, saying that this was a special junior class effort. Besides making me popular with my fellow juniors, it had the extra advantage of irritating Helena, a senior, who had had her heart set on running the fancy hat contest. Sophomores and freshmen were restricted to tasks like following the horses around and doing poop-pickup duty.

  Because the weather in this part of the world tends to turn pretty grim after Halloween, we were under pressure to complete our preparations quite quickly. Brooke, Emma, and Melanie served capably as my immediate underlings, churning out publicity, organizing volunteers, and coaxing donations of goods and services out of their nearest and dearest. When Brett realized that the event would not take place in a gymnasium and that there were no bouncy orange balls involved, he lost focus and wandered off to practice layups, and I didn’t see much of him. Honestly, sometimes I wondered if I shouldn’t let Helena just have him.

  I, naturally, was in charge of finances.

  I must confess that Brooke was invaluable to me. She shouldered boring and petty tasks without complaint and remained cheerful, however tense things got. It was a huge undertaking, and the fact that we had so many people helping meant that somebody had to schedule them and tell them what to do. Brooke was ever ready to jump into the Miata and fly off to fetch or carry or run the multitude of errands that needed to be done. The weather stayed beautiful and warm, so she flew from place to place like a jaunty little bird, with the top down and her hair flying in the breeze.

  And this brings up the sole point of contention between us during the months when I lived with her family. Since I already had my driver’s permit, I had been allowed to drive Aunt Antonia’s Cadillac on several occasions, with a duly licensed driver in the passenger’s seat. Although I was frequently told off for excessive speed, tailgating, and reckless overtaking, even Brooke and Aunt Antonia had to admit that I was both skillful and confident. Uncle Karl—who, by the way, owned a dashing little red Corvette he kept entirely for his own use—thought I was a hoot.

  “And there she goes! Danica Morgan Patrick, moving up to the head of the pack! She cuts them off ! She’s in the lead!” he would yell.

  “It’s because you learned to drive in Los Angeles traffic, I suppose,” Aunt Antonia said. “But really, Morgan, there is no need to be so aggressive here in upstate New York.”

  Yet no matter how well I drove, Brooke refused to teach me how to drive stick shift. When I persisted in my pleading, she would turn red and drop her eyes and then make some excuse to leave the room. I teased and begged and praised her little car, all to no avail.

  She would not turn over the keys to the Miata to me, the selfish beast.

  13

  I PRETTY MUCH DITCHED SCHOOL while we prepared for After the Race Is Run. I mean, who had time for class when there were so many people to order around? Actually, my teachers cut me a lot of slack. I was raising money for some moldy old racehorses, which I guess trumped statistics and the Civil War in their minds. I guess it helped that our principal was an avid rider and a polo player and was going to ride in the demonstration. He was superhyped about the whole event and kept patting me on the back every time he saw me in the halls.

  “Fine job, fine job, Ms. Johanssen! We’re very proud to have you as a student here at Lebanon Hill High!”

  And so they ought to have been. I am really, really good, I was discovering, at organizing events. I admit I had a solid team to trot around behind me tending to the boring details. Brooke was everywhere, doing everything. Emma knew the horse world and had been in shows before, so that was helpful—she kept me from looking ignorant by jumping in with information, and all I had to do was keep my mouth shut. Melanie organized the decorations and designed posters and flyers.

  Serena, being an animal lover, was naturally in seventh heaven and had to be forcibly removed from the horse barns because otherwise she wasted her time petting and cooing over them. She braided their tails and manes with satin bows, securing them with flower scrunchies and putting stupid hats with ear cutouts on their heads. She was lucky not to get kicked, in my opinion—they looked ridiculous. I stopped her before she got to my horse, physically barring her entry into Chessie’s stall.

  “No,” I said.

  She protested but gave in, daunted by the look in my eye. “I’ve signed up for riding classes too, so I’ll be joining you on Saturday mornings in the future,” she said.

  Fine. She and Brooke could lurch around the baby ring together and dress their horses up in pink tutus, for all I cared, so long as they left me to practice in peace. I, of course, was to demonstrate jumping at the benefit, along with Bounce’s niece and her friends.

  During the course of planning After the Race Is Run, I had to fill out a lot of documents and forms, and eventually, as I was in and out so often, I got the run of the high school office files. I am sorry to say that it didn’t occur to me immediately to take advantage of this fact. It was only after I ran across my own student file with a copy of my birth certificate, social security number, school transcript from LA, current grades and reports and so on, that I realized what a treasure trove this was. I copied everything (and a few other files for good measure) and brought them back home with me, secreting the pile of papers underneath my mattress for later study and consideration.

  I might not be any Michelangelo, but I felt certain that, with a little practice, I could learn to fake documents.

  The day before the event I had a big crew swarming over Hidden Hollow Ranch. There was less to do at Pegasus Stables because Bounce’s sister was handling that. Some stuff had to wait until the next morning, but we were organizing so that we had as little as possible to do at the last minute.

  One member of the crew of volunteers was the stupid cold girl who kept getting caught stealing at the mall. She was trailing around the stables, not doing much work and projecting a general aura of deceit and untrustworthiness. She ran her greedy little fingers over everything—pitchforks, dung shovels, bags of bran, saddles, and tack, assessing possible salability and cash potential.

  “Watch out for old light-fingered Francea over there,” I said to Brooke and Emma in a low tone. “I’m not sure what she thinks she’s going to steal from a stable, but I’m sure she’ll find something.”

  “What do you mean? Why would she steal something?” asked Emma, as Brooke stared at me, openmouthed.

  Evidently Francea had come to the same conclusion about there not being much worthwhile to steal in a
barn, because she began drifting away, toward the parked cars. She started walking oh-so-casually up and down the rows of vehicles, casting glances in through the windows, looking for any unprotected valuables that might be ripe for the picking.

  “Because,” I said, checking off the latest task on my list, “it is her nature to steal, that’s why. She eats, she sleeps, she steals. Francea the Felon. Didn’t you know? She’s been barred from every shopping mall in a thirty-mile radius. One more conviction, and it’s off to reform school.”

  They both turned to look at Francea, disbelieving. I could not imagine how they did not know this. She might as well have been wearing a T-shirt labeled, I AM A THIEF.

  “Stop staring, and we’ll catch her in the act. Even Francea isn’t stupid enough to take something while you’re looking right at her.”

  They stopped, but only so that they could begin arguing in loud whispers.

  “If that’s true, I don’t want to catch her in the act. The poor girl!” cried Brooke.

  “I don’t know,” said Emma. “It might be better if she does get caught. Then she could get some counseling. Wow, she must have some real trauma in her background to act like that.”

  I stopped running my eyes down the list of chores and looked at them.

  “Why do you think that, Emma?” I asked. “And why do you feel sorry for her, Brooke?” Honestly, I was curious. Why would they react like that? “Your cars are both parked out there. Did you leave anything in them you’d regret losing? Doesn’t it make you mad to think of her taking your stuff?”

  They both turned to see how close Francea was to their cars. Not too close, evidently, because they turned back again.

  “Everybody knows that people steal compulsively like that because they’re compensating for some deep-seated loss in their life,” Emma said. “It’s hardly even her fault. She should be stopped because it isn’t fair to the rest of us, but she needs counseling so she can make her peace with whatever bad experiences are making her do this.”